I had mentioned to one of the guys at work how I was trying to setup a testing region for this blog on my server at home last Thursday. I also said how I was having trouble getting everything setup properly. Right away he told me to check out XAMPP.
Here’s a brief description from their site:
Many people know from their own experience that it’s not easy to install an Apache web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.
In all seriousness, it really was that easy. I’ve never had an installation for any type of server/database software as smooth, easy, and fast. Once it was installed, it has its own control panel that can start and stop each of the services, in addition to, I believe, a couple other things.
The installation itself took under 10 minutes and the setup for my testing region took maybe another 20 since all I needed to do was import my database and move my web folder to the server.
If your interested in playing with Apache webserver, PHP scripting, or MySQL databases, I highly recommend giving this a go.
Leave a Reply